Some Monologues

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

Sahar Khraibani’s ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST contends with desire, grief, and language as sites of injury and release. Written over a period of three days—amid ongoing genocide, land seizure, and displacement—the long poem counters logics of possession with those of relation. Khraibani’s all-caps, first-person address impels the poem forward, centering intertextuality as a force through which spectral presences shine.

Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has been presented with Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergic among others. Sahar is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Arts Writers Grant, a fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, a 2024 residency at Mass MoCA, and is an alumni of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and is the author of Anatomy of A Refusal (1080PRESS, 2025). 

ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST lays bare the “SENSELESS DECAY” potentiated by empire’s relentless categorization, containment, and calculated death delivery. Khraibani’s debut chapbook collapses the imposed and perceived distance written by borders, disrupts anticipated colonial language logics, and bursts “INTO THE MADNESS OF THE ORGY” with queer interference reverberating in all directions. From the soil, from the graveyard, from the dancefloor, from their favorite spot on the eroding waterfront, Sahar broadcasts, IN ALL CAPS, “THE UNNAMEABLE TRUTH.”
— Andrea Abi-Karam

Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon and twenty years after her family’s emigration to America, Minh Nguyen returns to her native Vietnam to find out what’s left of the old revolutionary project. In Memorial Park, a collection of essays pairing travelogue and criticism, Nguyen encounters relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of authoritarian control amid an evermore corporatized society. Along the way, she considers how contemporary artspeak confuses state censors, the rise of luxury “Smart Cities” as they supplant socialist housing complexes, and the enduring appeal of propaganda signs that once promised utopia. 

Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park avoids nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it has not. What emerges is a complex picture of the country today and a reflection on how we inherit and reckon with radical histories that shape our world.

Minh Nguyen is a writer and curator based between New York City and Ho Chi Minh City. She is the curator of Dogma, a collection and gallery in Ho Chi Minh City focused on art and political graphics, and managing editor of e-flux journal. Her art and film criticism has appeared in publications such as Art in America, Artforum, e-flux, Momus, Mousse, and frieze, and she has curated exhibitions and programs at Wing Luke Museum, Northwest Film Forum, King Street Station, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Chicago Cultural Center. Formerly an instructor at Parsons School of Design—The New School, she has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant, Fogo Island Arts Writing Award, and New York University’s Asia/Pacific/America Institute Visiting Scholar fellowship.

Vietnam is dissected under Minh Nguyen’s sharp scalpel. Attending to the unresolved pathologies of the past and the detours of the present, Memorial Park sketches the multiple faces of a country in full mutation. In turn lucid, sensitive, acerbic, and full of humor, this collection of essays mixes personal narrative, and social, cultural, and historical critique with discerning observations to interrogate what remains of that old dream of a communism that is “too good to be true.”
— Thuận, author of Chinatown and Elevator in Sài Gòn

What would it mean to “normalize” one of the most transformative conflicts of the Cold War in public consciousness? And how might the diasporic imaginary trouble such narratives, whether revolutionary or reactionary? Some five decades after the fall of Saigon, Minh Nguyen returns to her ancestral home to confront both the live and mediated reality of Vietnam on the ground—and elsewhere. In deeply poetic, incisive, and insightful reflections, she speaks to what is “hauntingly unassimilable” about the present tense of the American War.
— Pamela M. Lee, author of Think Tank Aesthetics

With confidence and measure, this thoughtful collection investigates culture in Vietnam in today’s so-called post-socialist context. Nguyen makes sense of the nation through the conjunction of what she was told by her parents as a diasporic kid growing up in America, and what she experiences when she returns to Vietnam as an adult. Her writing unfolds complex political histories and their ongoing implications for contemporary art and cultural practice, with unique attention to process and how research happens. This book takes the reader on a journey at the end of which everything is as it was, but different through her telling.
— Yaniya Lee, author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art

Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.

Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They hold a degree in Comparative Literature from Reed College.

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.

The book pays homage to Wilson’s mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. A glut of signals and media recovers Carmelina’s vivid and urgent experience of exile from the Philippines to marry Wilson’s father—a Black American soldier—being disowned, and before that, of her parents’ assassinations during the Japanese Occupation. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. 

Mystique des rues vides et peu éclatantes des banlieues pavillonnaires, ce court poème en prose interpelle par sa langue sombre. Dans une parodie de messe noire – beigeasse comme le crépis des façades –, Théo Robine-Langlois dépeint le monde mystérieux des maisons individuelles, du repli sur soi démonique, et des vieilles qui marmonnent entre leurs gencives au retour du marché, le panier plein de gros sel et de radis noirs en guise d'hostie. Les mots occitans qui ponctuent le texte comme des conjurations en accroissent l’escur.

From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of "fan nonfiction" about living and writing in the age of extinction.

In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self.  

Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen.  

What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

Oh oh this is the first issue of Tongue Ring, a journal of experimental writing in English & French, with original contributions and translations of texts* by Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Vous voyez, c’est ça mon genre. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. 
Mais c’est mon genre. J’ai cet esprit en moi—qui est très ému
par la féminité. Je pourrais me mettre à pleurer. Je veux poser
mon manteau par terre pour la laisser marcher dessus
—Ariana Reines

Premier numéro de la nouvelle revue fantastique et bilingue (FR + EN) d’écriture expérimentale Tongue Ring, avec des contributions originales ainsi que des traductions* de textes de Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*.